Comment 69 for bug 60995

a couple dozne people does not make an explicit majority. Ranting about Microsoft isn't especially useful in presenting a rational case, for that matter. Bugzilla isn't and shouldn't be a democracy, since there is not a representative population here.

Let's look at this again:

We shipped Backspace == Back for 1.0/1.5 (and on Windows/Mac for 2.0) and while there were some instances of dataloss (just like tab closing, and any other option that navigates away from the page).

Some users don't like this, because they hit focus bugs and sometimes lose their form data. I haven't hit this ever, that I remember.

There isn't an explicit platform convention to speak of here, but there is a browser convention driven by IE's previously massive marketshare, and our own implementation predating Firefox.

Accel+[/] do work just fine, albeit requiring a more complex keyboard action.

Based on this, I'm not opposed to either case, but I'm not asserting one is better than the other for GNOME, because I'm not a GNOME HIG author, and not in sync with the overall direction for the platform and where they want to live on the convenience vs. dataloss risk curve. I think the dataloss risk is overblown here, given my own experience, but I'd like to see Calum's view on the issue explained here.